All-access pass

Feature

posted 20 Jul 2004 in Volume 1 Issue 2

When the Stockport Metropolitan Borough council decided to revamp its website to comply with the looming government deadline for issuing services online, it didn’t try to do the minimum for the greatest number of people – it went much further. Peter Blake, assistant chief executive for policy and communications with the council, explains how accessibility was built in to the now highly-rated site.

Stockport’s commitment to getting information out into the wider community goes back 30 years. In 1974, the council set up a series of satellite-information bureaus across the borough to act as information and advice centres for residents. It might seem quaint now, but at the time it was an ambitious move that made us a leader in the field in community-based access points.

Now with a population of 300,000, Stockport is continuing the tradition of accessibility with its new website. Free internet access is available via all our libraries, providing access to those who want it but don’t have it at home. And the more we’re able to deliver transactions electronically, the better we can re-route resources and help those people who need face-to-face contact.

Under the government’s modernising initiative, public-sector bodies in the UK are facing a deadline to deliver services online. By the end of 2005, all transactions that can be delivered online must be. In a policy document issued in 1999, this initiative was described by the government as a significant step forward in a long-term programme of reform. It was said to be modernisation for a purpose – part of an attempt to endorse the view of IT projects as something that happen in isolation within an organisation, rather than something that has to work with the organisation's needs in mind.

The targets and the 2005 deadline were put in place to compel all local authorities, central government departments and other public-sector bodies to embrace this view.

But there’s more to hitting targets than simply adding functionality to an existing IT system. At Stockport council, we took the decision to exceed targets rather than merely reach them and hit deadlines. But first we needed a more robust, streamlined and future-proof website that was as accessible as possible.

Setting the scene

The Disability Discrimination Act has new regulations that come into force in October 2004. They require everybody with a presence on the web to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to cater to the needs of web users with disabilities. The issue of greater usability has also been taken up by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C), who have enacted standards with levels of A, AA and AAA.

In April 2004, a report from the Disability Rights Commission found over 80 per cent of websites were “next to impossible for some disabled people to use”. Of 1,000 sites surveyed, not one managed to meet the W3C AAA compliancy standard.

Stockport council first set up a website in 1998. Since then, there have been four revisions of the site. Our previous website barely registered an A rating. The pursuit of the AAA standard was never one of our project’s initial aims, but we decided to aim as high as we could.

Having now achieved this recognition shows we were able to get to the heart of what was needed to make our new site a success. A fundamental part of getting it right was a genuine understanding of the needs of a local authority website, the needs of its audience and how these differ from the commercial world. Although this may be obvious, the differences are materially important and a failure to recognise them would have been disastrous.

Part of our duty is to communicate with the residents of Stockport and make sure they’re fully aware of the range of services the borough makes available. The driving force behind all of this is the welfare of residents, not profit or gain. It’s also to inform the public about who’s responsible for the provision of services and how they can engage in the democratic process and influence the level and quality of services.

When it comes to promoting the borough as a place to live and work, the site is vital. An organisation’s website can play a major role in influencing the decision to request job application details. If the site is positive, the person may make that vital inquiry. If it’s poor, they may look elsewhere. In terms of leisure and tourism, we feel the site allows us to punch above our weight. We are convinced the web is of more value than acres of promotional print.

The latest and the best

As mentioned previously, the latest version of the site has set new standards for online accessibility. It’s in line with the recommendations of a report issued in April 2004 by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) and is one of the first such sites in the UK to meet the exacting AAA standard of the W3C.

Services available through the site include paying council tax online, traffic and travel information, business directories and information on council services and local events. The site will eventually provide online access to hundreds of the authority’s services.

Such recognition is gratifying and has boosted staff morale. But winning praise was never the aim of our project. We wanted to strip down and rebuild the site and focus on accessibility and usability. We aimed for accessibility for all and succeeded. But the website is still far from perfect. Content needs more development and must become easier to transact with the public. Still, the foundation for progress is solid and we are seeing significant increases in use. One month after the April relaunch, the number of site visitors had increased to 57,027 from 47,201.

How we did it

The project to rebuild and relaunch the Stockport site from scratch was undertaken in partnership with a local design agency specialising in usability and accessibility.

On their recommendation and after further investigation, we purchased an out-of-the-box content-management solution that was citizen focused and designed for use by a local authority. We also bought an advanced search and publishing tool that offered greater access and usability. For example, if a citizen is searching for ‘rubbish’, the system will automatically know to connect to information about our litter and street cleaning services.

The council’s officer project team took a bold decision: any content from the old site not ready to be migrated to the new system by the deadline would not appear on the new site. And with a deadline of less than 12 weeks, minds were focused. We alerted all senior-management teams through personal meetings carried out by project manager Andrew Kirkham, our operational head of e-Services. We were then able to remove those pages where content hadn’t been converted so there would be no dead links.

Our content-management system (CMS) made us fully compliant with current government regulatory standards. The package we’re running places content into consistent local authority information categories. There were certain aspects we needed to have on the site, like an A-Z of services and a news section. The CMS delivered all of this in an already compliant package. It has provided our community with a unique level of accessibility for all users. We can now manage content and update it rapidly and efficiently.

Don’t forget accessibility

The elected council members were keen for the new site to reflect the needs of the wider Stockport community. So how did we ensure those with accessibility problems could make use of something like the A-Z guide?

After the usability survey on the incumbent site and a survey of local users and council staff, the site was found to be difficult to use, especially for the disabled and the elderly, and struggled to meet basic standards of the WC3.

Ensuring we reach out to all our local residents is a continuous challenge. We have a high rate of PC ownership in homes across Stockport. This allows us to cover a lot of ground. We’re producing web versions of some of our main printed communications, like our thrice-monthly civic newspaper, The Review. The online newspaper is attracting more attention and we’re able to e-mail single articles to people.

But there are many sections of the community without access to the internet. The Council has a duty to ensure it communicates with them and meets their needs.

We are now convening a group of people with a range of disabilities, including physically and visually impaired users, to review the new site and make suggestions for further enhancements. We’ve been learning as we go and have found it helpful to discover more about the range of disabilities to which we must try and cater.

We see accessibility as the art of developing the website to be used by the totality, not just the majority. It’s important our website is developed to serve the largest possible audience using the broadest range of systems (hardware and software platforms) and that the needs of users with disabilities are considered.

We have to appreciate users of our website may have different standards of technology. To ensure access to information on the site, the onus is on our web authors to deliver the content in a way that allows everyone to benefit.

Some of the key audiences to consider are:

The inexperienced user or technophobe
Electronic devices like video recorders, mobile phones and microwave ovens cause confusion for some people. Computers are no different. For many, the inherent complexities of a home computer can make retrieving information from the web very difficult.

The socially excluded
Portions of the public do not have the means to purchase a home computer. Computers with different hardware and software platforms in local libraries, colleges and internet cafés may be the only resource available to this sector of the population.

Non-English users
Although English is the most commonly used language on the Web, there are many people who don’t use it as their first language. Extra care should be taken to ensure the English used on our web pages is clear and concise. The council website has a dedicated homepage feature that links directly to an interpreting service provided by the Stockport English Language Service. The information contained within these pages represents the online version of the English translation panel associated with all of the council’s printed material.

Older users
Older members of the community may have one or a combination of disabilities listed below:

Physical Impairment
Recent disability figures for the UK suggest there are:

Over eight million people registered with one form of disability or another;
Of these, over two million have a visual impairment;
Eight million people suffer from some form of hearing loss;
One million people have a form of learning difficulty;
Over seven million people have a literacy problem.

Visual impairment
The web is superficially seen as a visual medium. But with the majority of information in a website in text format, there are many ways for this data to be manipulated. Screen reader software reads a web page one horizontal text line at a time. The text is spoken using a speech synthesiser, sent to a retractable Braille display or to a fixed single line display. Many people who are visually impaired still have a degree of usable vision, so magnification software is used to enlarge portions of the screen using a zoom feature.

Hearing impairment
Many who are hearing-impaired have little difficulty in using websites unless streaming audio and video files are used. This is overcome with the use of text captioning. This also assists non-English speakers who may find written language easier to understand than spoken.

Motor impairment
Many diseases and physical conditions can cause a complete loss or limited function of muscular control or movement. This translates to difficulty in using a conventional keyboard or a mouse. So-called sticky key software can make difficult keystrokes more accessible. The W3C web-accessibility initiative offers the ability to assign hotkeys to navigation elements. The use of speech-recognition systems allow users to speak commands to their computer. Other alternative input devices include pointer devices and eye scanning systems controlled by mouth or head movements.

Cognitive disability
Conditions like dyslexia can limit the understanding of information. Users may have problems with memory recall or text recognition; they may also have problems entering basic search information correctly.

Selective disturbance
Flickering and flashing text or images can trigger epileptic seizures in some individuals and do not encourage usability among the visually impaired.

A useful tool

The website is now an excellent service-delivery tool allowing the council to communicate and interact effectively with key audiences. Its look and feel projects Stockport council as being a unified organisation. These principles have been adopted to clarify the purpose of our internet presence and assist in the prioritisation of pages and structure of the site.

Internet content must assist the council in conforming to the following aims:

To support the community strategy and the council plan;
To provide direct, transactional services for citizens;
To support the democratic process;
To provide access to services and information of other agencies (joined-up government);
To provide a two-way information and communications resource for the council;
To promote Stockport to specific audiences to achieve corporate marketing and communication objectives;
To provide access to and support for lifelong learning;
To assist in the recruitment of high-calibre employees for Stockport council;
The site will also assist the council achieving in its 2005 e-government targets.

Here’s an example of one of the immediate ways a website helps a local authority. Remember the A-Z guide? We used to publish a printed version a few years ago but found it got out of date quite quickly. Now it’s online and it has become a more flexible and up-to-date resource. It acts as a backbone to our new site. More people are now used to receiving information electronically and we’ve seen an increase in the demand for other communications to be delivered this way. It’s also a highly effective way to demonstrate where council tax is being spent. For our council, the web will never totally replace letters, telephones or personal contact. But it will be a very important channel for thousands of taxpayers to access our services.

Accessibility and beyond

The new website goes well beyond the DRC requirements. It uses software to offer speech-enabled browsing to the visually impaired; access keys to enable easy browsing; skip navigation to make it easier to function within text-only browsers; as well as offering a text-only version of the site with high-contrast text and background. Little things also make a big difference. Usability research reports also allowed us to position menu bars, logos and news areas where we feel people would most expect to find them. Many sites fail to provide clear explanations on links. To make people operating text only or voice browsers feel less disorientated, we avoided putting ‘click here’ and used a more detailed link that reads ‘map to our offices.’

The design agency proved to be invaluable in assuring we got this right, but we’ll be using feedback from users to make adjustments.

The new site means we are able to publish and manage the vital information that all our citizens need in a timely and effective manner. This achievement has been all the more remarkable as the redesign of the website was completed in just ten weeks, making it not only one of the most accessible sites in the UK, but also one of the fastest deployed.

Plans are also in place for further testing of the site with disability user groups and the Royal National Institute for the Blind. We’ll also be seeking guidance from the Society of Information Technology Management. We feel the new site is a great one, but we don’t want to just leave it there. By striving to continually improve it, we want to make it a model of online excellence.

As pleased as we are, we’re certainly not complacent. The whole team is already fully committed to developing a plan for Phase II that will take our site to a new level and repurpose the content to a wider audience. The CMS we’re using can take this information and put it into multi-channel templates like digital TV and WAP. Indeed, we have already embarked on a digital TV pilot project. This will enable the site to have a broader reach and not exclude citizens without PC internet access in their homes.

As well as PC ownership, we’ve seen other shifts in society and lifestyle. We see mobile phone and digital TV technology as having greater appeal to much of the younger generation. Conceivably, these technologies could be used to make the council more responsive to the citizens it serves. For example, if you noticed a blown street light on your road, you might think to call and report it to council the next day. Realistically, you may forget by the next morning, but if you were able to report it via your digital television the moment you spotted it (or in the advert break), many more people would probably get involved and services would improve as a result.

Meeting the demands for online access will require the continued use of the best technology for our needs and on-going consultation with those we’re trying to communicate with – Stockport’s people.